Viewed in
2012
Formats
HDTV
Premise
Jeff Daniels stars as an arachnophobe doctor who moves into a small town, which is besieged by a deadly species of spiders.
Loved
Scary spiders.
Liked
Characters.
Thoughts
Much more fun than I expected.
Like most people, I'm naturally a little skeeved out by spiders, and the movie does a great job of playing off of that. They spring out at the screen, crawl all over body parts, and act creepy. The experience was further enhanced by making them venomous and prone to overpopulate. I'm surprised that no one's working on a 3D remake as we speak.
Director Frank Marshall had a great sense of timing. I was definitely on edge watching these evil little things sneak upon their unsuspecting victims, with the occasional (sometime hilarious) close calls.
It also helped that the movie was full of likable characters. Jeff Daniels was very believable in showing how the fear is truly paralyzing. (A friend of mine has a minor case of it.) So you end up really rooting for him and feeling his dread every time he's cornered with one of the creepy crawlers. The rest of the cast was well-fleshed out too. Instead of mindless mobs, there were definitely subplots with town folk coming from different points of view as the bodies pile up.
Knowing that this movie was made pre-CGI, it made the animal wrangling even more impressive. It felt like 90% of the spiders' screen time was from real live spiders, making the creep factor even more authentic. The rest of the time was skillful camera tricks and animatronics. Watching it two decades later, the special effects held up surprisingly well.
The movie wasn't perfect. It's got some of that 1980's movie sensibility about it. No cute animals got killed, you pretty much know who's going to survive the invasion, and occasionally characters do dumb horror movie things. The biggest culprit being the "spider expert" just carelessly wandering into the main boss's den without support. How the super spider invades the idyllic town was cheesy, and so was the, um, flaming spider. But overall, I don't think they're really flaws, because they add to the light-hearted and escapism tone of the movie.
I had a blast watching Arachnophobia, thanks to effective creepiness, solid characters, and occasional cheesy charm. It had a nice roller coaster feel, in which I was freaked out during the ride, but relaxed and smiling afterward.
